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Tonight’s column is far longer than I like to run, perhaps the longest one ever. But please don’t give up on it. Although I’d planned to write about developments we expect this week in various lawsuits, these are the times we live in. The situation with ICE is critical right now. I’ve packed a lot of information you’ll need this week as the situation in Minneapolis develops into this post, but don’t feel like you have to read it all at once. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, and for being part of a community that is committed to keeping the Republic, no matter what they throw at us.
Kamala Harris was right. On October 29, 2024, she told a crowd that had come to hear her speak on the Ellipse, “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office, On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list…Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within.’ This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
Trump has since proved her right.
We head into the coming week in an unsettled moment where the administration has blood on its hands. It would have been fair for the administration to call for time to investigate what happened in Minneapolis the morning Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. But that’s not what ICE’s leadership, the DHS Secretary, or the White House has done. They blamed the victim. They criticized her for exercising her rights as an American citizen. They called her a terrorist. None of this suggests the administration has good intentions. Vice President Harris told us this would happen and now it has.
Sunday morning, CNN’s Jake Tapper showed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem video of the mob attacking the Capitol on January 6.
Tapper: “I just showed you video of people attacking law enforcement officers on January 6. Undisputed evidence, and I just said, President Trump pardoned all of them. You said that President Trump is enforcing all the laws equally. That’s just not true. There’s a different standard for law enforcement officers being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters. We just saw that.”
Trump’s September 2025 Presidential Memo titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” (NSPM-7) spelled this all out. It divides the country into good guys and bad guys. If you’re for Trump, you’re a good guy. If you’re against Trump, you’re a domestic terrorist. The rules that apply to the two groups are different. Attack the police in support of Donald Trump (January 6), and you get a pardon; stop to watch what an ICE agent is doing, and it’s a death sentence.
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Trump attributed the need for NSPM-7 to dramatic increases in “Heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence.” He cited “the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk” and called out people who “adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology, embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence,” as the justification for the memo. He also cited the 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and “the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh” as further justification, along with the two assassination attempts on his own life and what he calls “riots” in Los Angeles and Portland that were a “1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers since January 21, 2025, compared to the same period last year.” He also wrote that “Separate anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots have left many people dead and injured and inflicted over $2 billion in property damage nationwide.”
Trump claims the recent “political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically.” He says it’s the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” No evidence is offered to support this. But that doesn’t seem to matter in the rush to a conclusion: “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.” Although at first this seemed targeted toward civil society and civil rights groups that advocated and litigated on behalf of Americans and their rights, now, it seems to be turned against anti-ICE protestors who are doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.
NSPM-7 identifies “common threads animating this violent conduct” as:
anti-Americanism;
anti-capitalism;
anti-Christianity;
support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
extremism on migration, race, and gender; and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
If you have any of these tendencies, or if the administration believes you do, one of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) is directed to investigate you.
There are about 200 JTTFs across the country. They are the nerve center of the federal government’s efforts to ensure potential acts of terrorism are detected before they can be committed. Agents and prosecutors from federal and state agencies meet to review cases and ensure nothing important is swept aside. The work can be intense and urgent. Now, Trump has ordered that the JTTFs “shall investigate” an exhausting laundry list of potential infractions committed by people who oppose his views. In Trump’s view, Americans exercising their First Amendment and other rights are violent domestic terrorists.
But it’s all one-sided. Just like Noem’s failure to recognize the crimes committed by January 6 defendants in the question from Tapper that we started out with tonight. It’s all a thinly veiled mechanism for criminalizing innocent behavior by anyone who opposes this administration. Hence the characterization of Good, who was unarmed when she was shot and killed by a law enforcement officer, as the “terrorist.”
Former Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who also led the Civil Rights Division at DOJ during the Obama administration, asked the right question: “Are the feds conducting any real investigation of the agent’s actions, or instead focused on trying to justify what happened by tarring the victim as a domestic terrorist?”
On Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked White House Border Czar Tom Homan about his boss’s characterization of what Good was doing when she was killed. “Noem called it an ‘act of domestic terrorism,’” Welker pointed out, “What’s the evidence for that allegation?” Homan tried to dissemble, “If they didn’t have sanctuary policies…” But Welker wasn’t having any of it. She fired back, “To be clear, is anyone who protests ICE a domestic terrorist?” Homan was forced to concede, “It’s a case by case basis. If you look at the definition of terrorism, it certainly could fall within the definition.”
We will likely learn more about the facts surrounding Renee Good’s death this week. Instead of a credible investigation being conducted by federal, state, and local law enforcement together, we have a turf war over the political spin being conducted by the federal government. Minnesota State AG Keith Ellison has ducked out, explaining he can’t conduct an investigation if he doesn’t have access to the evidence. At least for now, the local DA is conducting her own investigation.
Federal use-of-force standards govern agents’ behavior. They were updated by the Justice Department in 2022 and adopted by ICE in 2023. The policy explicitly prohibits shooting into a moving vehicle absent extreme circumstances, which these